The self-check on the Alignment page is a mirror you hold up yourself. This is a reading of your organisation against the same twenty-one criteria, with the evidence looked at and the whole working shown.
Most organisations cannot say how they decide things, and discover it only when a decision goes wrong. Not because nobody knows, but because the knowing lives in people rather than in anything written down, and that difference is invisible until someone leaves, someone disputes a call, or a funder asks who authorised it.
A structural assessment finds out which of those two an organisation is running on. It works through twenty one questions about how authority, money, exit, conflict and succession actually operate, and for each one it asks for the document that shows it. Where a document exists, the answer stands on the document. Where nothing exists, the answer is that nothing exists, and that is a finding rather than a failure.
You get one number and the entire working behind it. Each of the twenty one carries the band it scored, the strength of the evidence behind that band, the document cited, and exactly how much it moved the total. Nothing is a black box: anyone you show it to can re-derive it, because the criteria and the weights are published.
You sign up, and a person reads it. There is no automatic account. Someone sends you a personal link by hand, and that link is your way in and your one attempt. Expect a person, not an instant email; nothing about this is automated at the front door.
First you describe what you build with. A short set of questions about your technology and where you are heading with it. This part takes no preparation and nothing is scored on it.
Then you provide your documents, criterion by criterion. This is the part that takes real time, and the time is yours rather than ours: how long it takes depends entirely on how findable your own records are. Some organisations have everything in a week. Some discover in the process that the documents they assumed existed do not.
Then the assessment runs and your result appears with the full working. The run itself is minutes. You see your own result immediately; you are not waiting on a person to release your number.
A deeper per-criterion reading exists on top of that, which sets out what is missing on each one. It is released deliberately rather than automatically, because it is read together rather than delivered.
Real documents, and they can be private. A signed agreement, a dated decision record, a written policy, a fund record, an internal log from whatever system you actually run on. Nothing has to be public and nothing has to be verified by an outside party.
What will not carry you is description. A criterion answered by saying the thing is true, with no artifact behind it, scores at the bottom of the scale whatever the substance. That is deliberate, and it is the single thing worth knowing before you start: the assessment measures what is written down and in use, not what is understood and intended.
It measures how much operating machinery an organisation has built, which is close to the opposite of how valuable it is. A young organisation doing excellent work with two people will score low, correctly, and that is a statement about its stage rather than its quality. There is no pass mark, no ranking, and no league table. Nobody is ever sorted by this number.
It is a reading against a published instrument, not an audit and not a certification. No one comes and inspects; you supply the evidence and the working is shown so it can be argued with.
The assessment, at $100. Everything above. It exists today and runs today.
Working with a group to raise the score, at $1,500. This is people doing work with you, and the structured version of it is not built yet. What you are buying is the work, and a later assessment that reads whether anything actually changed. You are never buying a number. A score only moves because the organisation moved, and if the work happens and nothing changes structurally, the second reading will say so.
Payment goes to Green Earth Vision, the nonprofit.
What holds these together is that the instrument is the same in both directions. The thing that tells you where you are is the thing that later tells you whether you moved, and it is published, so neither reading depends on trusting the people who produced it.
From BEAM's file projects/beam/full-assessment-what-happens.md, copied on 2026-09-25.
What it is. Everything described above: the twenty-one, the documents, your own result and the full working, immediately.
It exists today and it runs today. Payment goes to Green Earth Vision, the nonprofit, and the receipt is for a service.
You get the assessment, and then we go through every answer with you and hand you what we have that scores better: if your decision making is weak you get ACT, and so on down the list. It is direct work with people, on calls.
We are not going to promise to raise it to the top, but it can definitely rise if you choose to use what we give you. The rise depends on you adopting what we hand over.
At the end we run the assessment again, and that second reading is part of what you are buying. You are never buying a number. If the work happens and nothing changes structurally, the second reading says so.
This covers the $1,500 engagement only. The $100 assessment is not refundable, because it delivers automatically when you pay and you have it in hand; the only case there is not receiving it at all.
When the re-run happens. At the end of the engagement, on a date both sides set at the start. You have sixty days after the last session to schedule it, and after that the engagement is closed and the refund window with it.
What gone up means. The same assessment, run again in full by your organisation and scored on the same version of the instrument as the first run. Higher overall is up; equal or lower is a refund. If the instrument changes between the two runs, the first run is scored again on the new version so the two are comparable, and you are told.
Who decides. The score decides. No judgment call sits between the two numbers and the refund.
How to ask, and how it comes back. By email within thirty days of the re-run. The money goes back in full to the way you paid, within fourteen days of asking, with no fee kept.
Four things, and nothing else. The next step is a person sending you a link by hand, not an instant login, so expect a person rather than an email from a machine.